Windows 10 Shows “all your files are right where you left them” at boot

Many users have asked questions about the following message that seems to appearing randomly when you booting your device: “all your files are right where you left them” some people even reported that this message appeared while they were working on the computer or when they came back from being away from the computer for a few hours.

The message itself is nothing to worry about to be honest. Windows is simply doing some maintenance and to avoid this going wrong, you are temporary not allowed to work on your computer.

We know that Windows deciding to block you out of your computer doesn’t feel well and we can understand however this process is required to ensure all your files and your file system integrity remain intact and in good health.

What’ve caused this?

In most cases improperly shutting down your computer causes this to happen and Windows will show “all your files are right where you left them” after the boot screen. You could compare it a bit to checkdisk in Windows XP which started to scan your HDD after you’ve improperly shut down.

There are some other reasons that could’ve caused this but we are unsure which they are and do not like to speculate.

Windows doesn’t start anymore after “all your files are right where you left them”

It’s highly unlikely that Windows is damaged when this message appears and we suggest that you simply wait a bit longer, this process really should not take longer than 2 hours if it does then you could try to force shutdown your system, however, that might make things worse.

If the message stays appearing and doesn’t go away then you could consider reinstalling Windows 10 on your system however this should simply not happen, if you did have to reinstall Windows 10 then we would love to hear it through a comment on this article.

2014, 2015 & 2016 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Windows
Yuri specializes in troubleshooting (crash analysis and devices), system resource utilisation and system performance. He is also very interested in Customer Security. Yuri can be found as Windows Community Moderator and Wiki Author on Microsoft Answers and is active on different communities all across the web.

WindowsInstructed has been founded as a Windows solutions website for the most common Windows issues that users are experiencing while using their system. We index many online communities and look for a pattern of problems. When we find a pattern we will ask one of our experts in that expertise to write a Troubleshooting guide for the problem.